Indented Paragraph Text Flow Around Images

[weiphotoarts]

I’m having difficulty with flowing text around images. Specifically, the paragraph type has an indent, and the image is either a) Moves with paragraph or b) Position on page with Paragraph.

I have three pictures to illustrate my problem.
Pic1 is a typical no-indent paragraph. Nisus Writer Pro handles the image and paragraph flow just fine, as you can see by the double arrow.

Pic1

Pic1_rtf-web.jpg (68.46 KiB) Viewed 6337 times

Pic2 is a typical indented paragraph (which I have styled) that is not handled correctly by the text around the image. The paragraph does not indent the first line. NWP handles it as if it were in Pic1.

PIc 2

Pic2_rtf-web.jpg (70.55 KiB) Viewed 6337 times

Pic3 is a tedious solution I came up with. For each picture I have on the left side, the text can flow correctly on the right, if I move the indent markers over to the right to match the edge of the image right margin. A painful work-around. Most of my pages have this type of picture, and I often resize the picture, depending upon the flow of my work. So I need to tailor the paragraph indent, each time.

Pic3_rtf.jpg (92.74 KiB) Viewed 6337 times

Question: Is there an easier, more automatic way of doing text flowing around images on the right hand side of text, with indented paragraphs?

Thank you for your efforts.

[adryan]

G’day, weiphotoarts et al

Positions of margins, indents and tabs on rulers are absolute, not relative. Image insertion is not going to alter the ruler settings, so it is not to be expected that your Pic 2 look other than it does. I think your solution in Pic 3 is the easiest for non-technical people. It can be made easier by standardizing on image size, which would allow you to apply (hopefully a limited number of) paragraph (ruler) styles to affected text.

Another possibility would be to confine these image+text passages to separate Sections. You would insert a Section break before and after the passage, then split the Section into two columns, with the image in the left column and the text in the right. This method at least allows you to see your ruler settings in an easily understood context. However, the appearance may not be to your liking, as there is likely to be lots of white space in one column or the other.

Any such layout issues should not be addressed until the final stages of manuscript preparation.

The more technically minded could write a macro to do things automatically. In outline, one would find all occurrences of images, interrogate Image Object properties of each to get its width, then calculate the required values for any margins, indents and tabs to give sufficient clearance of text from image, and finally apply these values to the relevant paragraph rulers. Regrettably, I do not have time to do this myself at present.

Hope this helps (somewhat!).

Cheers,
Adrian

[weiphotoarts]

Adrian,

Thank you kindly for your clear explanations. I found your solutions wonderful. I intend to follow my work-around #3, until I get more experienced in Nisus Writer Pro. (I'm just 3 weeks into using it.) And then if I have a need for using your macro solution, I will learn to code NWP macros, using your outline of steps to take.

Again, Thanks.

Wei

[phspaelti]

As a small tip, I would suggest that with your work-around #3 you only adjust the first line indent, and leave the main indent at the margin. This will have the advantage that if your paragraph extends beyond the image, the text will automatically begin wrapping back to the full paragraph width.

As to Adryan's macro solution; I foresee insurmountable difficulties. It would be possible to figure out the amount of indent necessary for a known image, but it would be close to impossible to know which paragraphs would require the adjustment, i.e., which paragraphs are being made to wrap on account of any given image, or vice versa determine with certainty which image would (be likely to) cause any given paragraph to wrap.

A "partially-automatic" macro might be possible. This macro would look for the closest image preceding the insertion point, and adjust the indent for the paragraph containing the insertion point. You would still have to trigger the macro for each paragraph you want adjusted.

And here is a macro that works like that: